quit you
by mayaheart
Summary: Maya's trying to convince herself that maybe the universe will give her this one thing. Maybe she was given a dad who was never meant to be a dad at all and a mother who thought playing the role of mom just wasn't enough but maybe she got all of this so she could find her salvation in long brown hair and eyes that scream "God you're wonderful."


Maya knows she's screwed when Riley gets locked in her head.

When she was younger, she always had dreams about being a spy when she fell asleep. They were a little jumbled and didn't make much sense (she once had one where she fought Godzilla and as a reward for defeating him, he gave her his ankle without the foot attached) but they overall ended the same way. Glory. Fame. Spotlights. A key to New York City given to her by the mayor. No matter what it was, outlines of a family always looked up at her from the crowd, the sun shining through their teeth.

Now she's thirteen years old and every night when she goes to sleep, she sees fractured images of twirling Riley around in the school gym, fingers running through brown hair, eyes locked into hers, the sound of jazz music swaying in the background like- blaring beeping noises shaking her nervous system.

She wakes up with a groan and smashes her alarm clock. She wants to go back to sleep but it won't be the same. She'll probably just dream her hair has turned into snakes or something else that will absorb her.

She gets up, throws on an oversized purple hoodie with a random number on it and some jeans and black boots before making her way to the Matthews' house. She knows that Riley will still be getting ready at this point, so she climbs up the fire escape, knocks on the window.

Riley pushes it open and grins at her best friend, eyes crinkled. "Good morning!" she sing songs.

Maya climbs in, flops down on the purple cushion and stares at her best friend, eyebrows downward. "How big of a bowl of sugar oats did you have this morning?"

"I haven't eaten yet." Riley skips over to her desk, plucks up a brush, and absentmindedly begins to brush her hair, even though it's already been combed through and sits neatly on her shoulders, as usual.

Maya closes the window and leans against it, feeling the glass cool against her back. "So why are you Ms. Peppy Peppington?" she arches an eyebrow.

"I just had a good dream last night." Riley giggles.

Maya stares up at her, eyes empty. She doesn't want to know. She doesn't want to know because she already knows and she doesn't want to hear it out loud.

"Well?" Riley presses.

"Well."

"Aren't you going to ask me what it was about?"

"You're gonna tell me no matter what." Maya shrugs.

"Lucas and I went to the movies! And it was something scary, like rated PG 13. And afterwards, we went for a walk and he kissed me and it was…" Riley flops down onto her bed, letting out a loud sigh and Maya's happy for her. Really, she is. Riley's always dreamed of a pink first kiss and a white wedding and she deserves a boy like Lucas who's tall and handsome and has a voice like rocks falling. She really, really, does.

Maya lies down beside Riley and stares at the ceiling that looks like her childhood and wonders what it would take to clean Riley from her system. She used to the have this neighbor, an older man, who would throw back handfuls of pills (mostly just vitamins) and when she asked why, he said it filtered all the bad stuff from his blood stream and Riley's not bad but god is she rotting Maya's brain.

The more Riley talks about Lucas, the more Maya realizes how much she wants to talk about Riley. Everything Riley feels for that stupid cowboy Maya feels for Riley tenfold and it crashes into her chest like a rocket slamming into Earth's atmosphere and it slices her in half until she pours out into Riley's bedroom. Until she can see fragments of herself underneath her desk and floating up to the ceiling.

"Girls!" Mr. Matthews bellows, because it's Friday and Maya always comes over on Fridays and maybe she should stop so she can stop feeling this, this thing, this solid drumming behind her chest but Riley's impossible to quit. "School!"

Riley jumps up because school means Lucas and Maya only follows because school means Riley and at least when she's with her, she can convince herself that everything she's feeling is normal. Because Riley looks at Maya with adoration too and Riley's eyes dance when she sees her too.

Maya's trying to convince herself that maybe the universe will give her this one thing. Maybe she was given a dad who was never meant to be a dad at all and a mother who thought playing the role of mom just wasn't enough but maybe she got all of this so she could find her salvation in long brown hair and eyes that scream "God you're wonderful."

Maybe one day she'll be Riley's something pink, swirling kisses into her cheekbones.

But then they're at school and Riley is peering at Lucas from behind her locker, eyes gripped wide. Maya reminds herself that the universe did bring Lucas here- dropped him from the middle of nowheresville Texas to the exact middle school in New York City where a seventh grade girl thought he hung the moon up with rodeo ropes.

"You should just go talk to him." Maya spits out because she can't stand this waiting anymore. She can't stand dreading a moment that seems so distant. She can't stand the thought that at some point, all of this is going to come to a head and she's going to be forced to realize that the stars have already laid out a path for Maya Hart on a back road filled with abandoned tree stumps and beady eyed vultures while Riley races down the highway, the speed of the Earth twirling on its axis.

Riley does talk to him but it leads to nowhere, as usual, because Lucas is a _gentleman_ with a soft country accent and the means to make Riley happy that Maya hates him for even though she knows she shouldn't.

That night, she sits in Riley's living room, on the edge of her couch. Riley's coming home later, had latched onto Lucas for a project in Mr. Matthews' class before Maya could object. Maya's working with Farkle and they're doing it over text so she doesn't have to spend two seconds with the scrawny boy who grabbed her first kiss from her fingertips and planted it on Riley's lips (Maya's been having a bit of a problem lately with misplaced resentment). Riley, however, is at the library, nose buried deep into books and eyes into Lucas.

"You doing okay Maya?" Mrs. Matthews muses softly above her. She sits down beside Maya, plate of cookies in hand, holding them out to the younger girl.

Maya shakes her head. Everything tastes sour lately. Even the air is just too heavy to stomach.

"Anything you wanna talk to me about?" Mrs. Matthews sits down beside Maya, slides the cookies onto the table. "They're store bought you know." she glances at the cookies. "I won't be offended if you don't like them. Cory might be though. He's oddly into supermarket cookies. He's oddly into a lot of things, actually."

Maya gives her a quiet grin but still doesn't take one. She feels her emotions stirring beneath her chest as she looks up at Ms. Matthews and there's so much hope and warmth and comfort in her eyes and "What do you do if you think you like someone and you're pretty sure there's no universe where they'll other like you back and you're just-"

"Terrified?" Ms. Matthews asks, smiling with understanding and Maya feels a little piece of relief having released at least something from her system. "Boys are the worst, aren't they?"

Maya swallows hard and her head falls into Mrs. Matthews' shoulder and she's not sobbing or anything but tears are falling down her face and "Yeah. Yeah they are."

Maya thought she was screwed when Riley came into her head but nothing is worse than when she comes in a minute later, through the front door, leans up against it and gives a big, happy, Snow White sort of sigh.

"Boys are the best."

She exhales as Maya inhales and she feels the oxygen run through her lungs and get stuck there for the rest of the night.

They lay down side by side in Riley's bed, after eating pizza and watching a movie and talking about Lucas. They stay up late but not late enough. Riley's out by two but Maya's too terrified to dream so she sits on the bench by Riley's window and watches her best friend sleep and wonders if maybe there's even a tiny part of Riley that's falling for Lucas so hard because she's trying to quit Maya just like Maya's trying to quit her.

Maya doesn't do well in school but she's not anywhere near stupid and she's definitely not stupid enough to believe herself. So instead, she grabs a pen and leans against the window. She draws a picture of a tree and it's pink because that's the only pen she could find. Its branches crawl onto her fingertips and she looks at it, imagines a world inside of it where all the lights are yellow and the universe is on her side. There are tears brimming at her eyes now and as she wipes them away, the drawing smears. She turns her head to the right, just slightly, and watches the sun rise over New York City, not bothering to salvage the picture, now nothing more than a smudge.


End file.
